I wish to speak with you today about empathy, compassion, respect, and honor. These are all virtues and, as such, are aspects of ourselves.
When we have empathy, it’s not like sympathy such that we just feel sorry for someone or pity them, empathy has to do with a desire on our part to feel what it feels like to be them in a particular situation, to experience their perspective. It’s very powerful.
Compassion has to do with a desire on our part to alleviate suffering – to not only feel what someone’s feeling but to want to alleviate whatever suffering is going on. So, love is brought into whatever it is that they’re experiencing (on our part). This is where love enters in.
Right here is often where empathy and compassion get confused in the actual efforts that someone makes to alleviate someone else’s suffering.
This effort is often unsuccessful or limited in its effectiveness, since it is possible to alleviate someone’s immediate suffering, but it doesn’t mean that the suffering will not return.
If we change our perspective on each person we meet, empathizing as best we can and with our compassion, hold in check our desire to alleviate something.
Instead, we should allow ourselves to respect how we have configured their life – all the players in their life, all the circumstances in their life that they’ve drawn to themselves.
It’s not because they’re unenlightened or because they’re foolish or because they’re bad or wrong but because they had a desire long ago (and still do) to learn something, to experience something deeply.
And thus, the components of their life are set in place so that they can have an experience. Rather than judge people for being foolish or setting up circumstances that won’t work or becoming what we might call a “drama magnet,” respect whatever it is that their soul is enacting so that they can learn something.
And, out of that, bring ‘our’ love to the situation. Love them exactly as they are, how they have configured their life. All the circumstances and all the incidents have something to teach them, and what we can do is respect that entire scenario that is their life as they experience it and honor it with love. Bring honor to their life with love.
When people really want your help, you’ll know it, and when they’re ready to hear whatever wisdom you have to impart, they’ll let you know that, too.
Lately, it has become clear to me that if I offer advice to a person who does not solicit it, I diminish them. There’s some truth in that.
It does require that we let ourselves feel what we feel when we see someone suffering, when we see someone making mistakes (or what we consider mistakes) and, have empathy and compassion and respect for ourselves so that we can honor our process. It is not about them, it is always about us.
We do not know what their soul blueprint is or what they chose to experience or what they came to teach us about ourselves.
It is we who called these people into our lives. It’s us that have generated these feelings in ourselves. Perhaps it’s the feeling of helplessness or sadness that we can’t really alleviate the suffering of others the way we would like to.
The only thing we can do is to remember to love who we are regardless of our effectiveness in bringing about change to ourselves or others.
It is time we learned to honor our own journey with love. We can do the same with everyone we know, but first with our ‘self’ – until we do this one with and for ourself, we cannot do it for another.
We need to ease back on our judgments and see if we can discern with empathy, compassion, respect and honor the magnificence of the drama before you of every soul, including your own. That is one big learning curve for all of us.
Remember the saying in the late 70s and early ’80s – “be the change you desire” or ‘”Be part of the solution, not part of the problem”. – this still applies today.
This is how we heal the planet. This is how we collectively birth a ‘New Earth.’ It is truly about living our lives in love and compassion for ourselves.
This way we slowly remove the blinders and begin to see with new eyes as we recognize that we are all part of the whole, there is only one of us and we are ‘IT’- it is our world and the way to heal it and bring it back to its original ‘Heaven is right here, right now’ is to change the way we feel and project our own selves.
The same reminder: “How you think and feel, you project. What you project, you create. What you create is the world you find yourself living in.”
And the only way you are going to create the world you desire, is to change your thinking and feelings – you are the one projecting them and remember, what you project, you create. No what ifs or buts, this is the reality check we must all remember. This is pure science as well as true spirituality.
Rest in that.
Thank you for reading this, and thank you, Laurent, for the many talks we shared when knowledge becomes knowingness.
